Re: Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

[Mark Mielke <mark mark mielke cc>]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 01:37:07PM -0500, Otto Haliburton wrote:
> Actually, RHL is taking the same exit from the open source community that
> SCO did.  RHL wants to be commercial and one of the obstacles to being
> commercial is to have your source being developed by the open source
> community (that doesn't mean that it is bad in anyway), because you don't
> control the license or the patent so you are limited as to what you can
> charge i.e. RHL can only profit from support and not from the sell of the
> product.  So the model is to drop the open source community and adopt a
> product which you license and patent and raise the price.  Exactly what SCO
> did.

SCO has done quite a few things over the past few years. Only the more recent
claim to owning Linux has been awful, and from my perspective, completely
unrelated to the context at hand.

Let's just assume that RedHat was operating at a deficit in providing
RedHat Linux to the community (I don't have the numbers to prove it, but
I would take large bets that this is the case...), which option would *you*
prefer?

   1) Getting rid of RedHat Linux.

   2) 'Out-sourcing' work to volunteers. (rhl.redhat.com)

   3) Sponsoring a compatible alternative, and embracing the alternative
      under the same umbrella. (fedora.redhat.com)

As a RedHat Linux user, I liked 2), and I really like 3).

NOTE: RedHat Enterprise Linux, as well as I can perceive, is still
'open', in that the source code is available to the public. RedHat is
just limiting or reducing the amount of paid staff time that is spent
on companies or individuals who don't pay for services. So, I don't see
what is being lost, except for the free binaries, which you could
produce yourself.

mark

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